Part VII-- Numbers 10-1:
10. Americana
Neil Young
When a basketball player is having an exceptionally good night shooting, he'll often throw up a ridiculous shot that on most nights would have no chance of making it into the basket It's called a heat check. If it goes in, it's confirmed that dude is, in fact hot that night and can do no wrong.That's what this album is.
Getting his band Crazy Horse back together after more than a decade and a half off, Young wanted the guys to focus on material for their new album, Psychedelic Pill (# 28 in this countdown), so when they got together and started practicing, they didn't play any of their own old material. Instead, following up on a one-off live performance Young had had with the Dave Matthews Band, in which they covered Oh Susannah (88), Crazy Horse started playing around with old folk songs or, as Young puts it, "songs we all know from kindergarten". Susannah led to Clementine (116), led to Tom Dula (the name of the real guy Tom Dooley was written about) and the next thing you knew, there was enough material for an album.
In collecting material from 1619's God Save the Queen (with sthe track's second half comprised of 1831's America [My Country 'tis of Thee]) through 1964's High Flyin' Bird, the band pulls out the lost verses they don't sing to the kiddos, a la the real Grimm's fairy tales and paint a portrait of murder, betrayal and rebellion fitting for the nation it celebrates. This is Young and the Horse painting a picture of America, warts and all, while turning a children's sing-along into an eight-minute guitar-fest. In almost every case, the treatment works, with the lone exception being their cover of 1957's Get a Job. This is in part because guitars and doo wop just don't mix but also because of our natural squeamishness around anything even tangentially related to the television show Sha Na Na, which has always creeped us out in a big way. Damned thing should've been called Pedophilia: The Musical.
But we digress.
This album proves three things: Good songs will always have a new life if someone takes the time to record them; great bands can make great songs sound fresh; if you work hard, make mistakes -- learn from them -- and live long enough, you will eventually have the professional, personal and financial freedom to do whatever you want.
Just call it a heat check.
9. Sensational Space Shifters
Robert Plant
Robert Plant's music has taken some interesting roads since the turn of the century. Having found fame as the front man of one of the most popular bands in history, his place as a rock icon was set. Beginning in 1999 though, he started exploring more folk and blues material in working with Priory of Brion and a new band he created called The Strange Sensation. After pairing with Alison Krauss to record a Grammy winning collaboration, he took a step away from recording others' material and recoded an alum of mostly original songs with his Band of Joy which continued to explore the music of the 1920s and 30s US South. It seemed to be the logical progression of an extremely talented musician: rise to unfathomable fame in his youth, mellow out over the years, explore his roots and kind of ramp it down. He even married Patty Griffin. The rocking days were done with.Not so fast.
Plant opens this live album with the Bukka White classic Fixin' to Die [Blues] (67) and proceeds to rock the crowd's face off for the next hour and a half. Having rediscovered his, "big voice", as he says, he uses the hell out of it in this superb 15-song set.
Mixing in some of his solo material, some reworked stuff from his days in Led Zeppelin and nod to White and other influences, Plant and his band go hard on this record and make a song like Griffin tune, Ohio (83) shine as a lovely acoustic guitar-driven change of pace. A strong Whole Lotta Love/Steal Away/Bury My Body medley leads to a finale of Another Tribe, followed by Gallows Pole, leaving the crowd and this listener blown away by a performance we never saw coming. As recent discoverers of Plant, this serves as a great primer for our initial delving into his catalogue and is the best live album of 2012.
8. Babel
Mumford and Sons
Island Records, in a stroke of genius, released the weakest song on this album as its first single. It didn't matter what song they selected. It was going to be a Top Ten hit and the album was going to sell 100,000 copies in its first week. This is a tried and true record company trick. When an album follows a huge hit, they generally pick a lesser song for the lead single then go with the best track later on to re-launch sales. While I Will Wait (3) is a fine song, it is simply a continuation of that which was heard on Sigh No More. It got them the radio play they wanted and as such was a safe choice.This album is a modest improvement for a band still feeling its way through almost instant success. The tendency here would have been to kick out a formulatic collection of songs that took no chances and tried to recapture the lightning in the Sigh bottle. And while there is not a great departure, there is some progression into a more arena-worthy sound, paired with a touch more gloss, while maintaining the heart of who they were going into the studio the first time.
Marcus Mumford still has an occasional tendency to turn the most beautiful of lyrics into a misguided mess by over thinking things but that is part of his development as an artist and adds a bit of charm to things. They're not trying to be Coldplay; it's ok to sound a little flawed on occasion. Using acoustic instruments, solid harmonies and real emotion, this music is every bit as personal as their debut album and makes us continue to enjoy the evolution of this band.
In ten years this will likely not be seen as their best album but it will have elements of what will contribute to whatever album that is. That being said, it is still one of the better albums of the year.
Our favorite track: Ghosts That We Knew
7. Observator
The Raveonettes
Battles with clinical depression and a post-back surgery drug addiction, while listening to The Doors are said to be the inspiration for this album.It's a dark world of hazy riffs, wrecked love and drunken assholes that populate Observator and we love every second of it because underneath all the reverb and stomp pedal action lies truly gifted song writing. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo have been at this for about a decade now and taking their paired vocals and marrying them to superb guitar work and, in a new development, some piano, they continue to expand one of the more comprehensive sounds in music.
Going into the dark corners of despair and angst in Young and Cold, visiting the demons within on The Enemy or visiting the lush inspiration grounds of the Jesus and Mary Chain on album closer Till the End (sic), The Raveonettes continue to be the class of the fuzzy-reverb throwback bands. Sinking with the Sun could have been a hit in 1989 or 2009 and that's what draws us to this album. It hearkens back to a time in our life we thoroughly enjoyed, while pointing out that is wasn't all rainbows and unicorns and, while those were great times we like reminiscing about, we have no interest whatsoever in once again living them.
Our favorite track: She Owns the Streets (10)
6. Old Ideas
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen has always lived in those halcyon hours, "when the day has been ransomed/And the night has no right to begin"*. He sings of spirituality, sexuality, despair and isolation with such withering honesty that it is literally impossible for us to diagram the path he takes that ultimately leads his listener to contentment in the present and hope for the future. It would be easy to say it's simply because he's 78 years old and the elderly just have a way of doing that. It would be completely inaccurate however because Cohen has been doing this for over 50 years. It would also do a disservice to what the man has accomplished in the last decade.In 2004, some eleven years into semi-retirement (his last public appearance had been in 1993), Cohen's daughter discovered her father had inadvertently paid the credit card bill of his business manager, in the amount of $75,000. Tip, meet iceberg. By the end of 2005, Cohen learned that all but $150,000 had been drained from all of his and his charitable foundations' accounts -- and he no longer owned the rights to most of his songs. After pouring his heart and soul into his career, at 70 years old he was essentially broke.
So what did he do? In 2006 he released a book of drawings and poetry that became a best seller. Two years later, at 72, hit the road on a world tour. Dude was literally singing for his supper and has not stopped since. Two live albums were released in 2009 and another in 2010 but this wasn't a straight money grab, as the latest, Songs From the Road is uniformly regarded as a spectacular album. Then, rather than live off the works of his past, here is Cohen, at 78 years old, putting out new material.
An unflinching glance at impending mortality permeates this album, beginning with the first track, Going Home, where Cohen signs of, "Going home without my burden/Going home behind the curtain." It continues and expands to include the loss of his fortune and, more importantly to him, someone he had considered a true friend, in Darkness (175), "I've got no future/I know my days are few/I thought the past would last me/but the darkness got that too." While the hurt is piercing in these tales, the writer never leads us into self-pity or a permanent melancholia. For just when we're on the verge of wallowing, he presents us with a plaintive plea to a lover, "I dreamed about you baby/You were wearin' half your dress/I know you have to hate me/But could you hate me less?"
Ethereal background singing supports the spiritual hymn we knew was coming in Come Healing and in the end that's what this is -- a personal healing for Cohen. Thankfully, he brought us along for the journey. We have no idea where we will be in our late 70s but we sure as hell hope we're still as invested in life, love, the sacred and the sexual as Leonard Cohen is. Similarly, we don't know how much longer he's going to be with us but whatever wisdom he has left to impart, we want to hear.
Our Favorite track: Show Me the Place (44)
*From Amen.
5. Shields
Grizzly Bear
Our first exposure to Grizzly Bear was burning their 2008 cover of The Crystals' 1962 song He Hit Me (and it felt like a kiss), onto CD and giving it to our buddy Ivan on Valentine's that year and watching him freak out as he tried to figure out what we were trying to tell him. We were saying nothing of course and were just digging freaking him out.We checked out their catalogue and saw something we love seeing in a band: steady progression. From their decent initial effort, 2004's Horn of Plenty, to 2006's Yellow House to 2009's Veckatimest, the band continually improved upon the richly-layered, heavily textured sound they were going for. By that 2009 record, they had almost mastered it.
On this album, they do. The final piece was strength of lyric. Until now, Grizzly Bear was an interesting-sounding band but they really had nothing to say, a fact that was brought home in Rolling Stone's review of lead single Sleeping Ute (63), (which predated the release of the album). The reviewer, clearly not having heard the rest of the album, clearly assumed we were in for more of the usual when he wrote, " What's he going on about? Bet you won’t mind listening 10 more times to figure it out." That was the story of listening to Grizzly Bear up until now.
A change in how they write, moving to a more collaborative style has served them well and propelled them into the realm of truly great bands. It also affected the music on this album as, rather than a constant thematic soundscape, you have songs with multiple movements, originating as acoustic ballads only to turn into distortion-filled psychedelic rockers before doubling back to a synth-laden slow-jam. Thing is, it all works. While in the past, the band has come perilously close to over-production, doing things like layering vocals as many as six times over to eliminate imperfections, on this album the flaws show a little. While creating appreciably more complex music, they've backed off a bit on the board and allowed some of the imperfections to rise to the top. These production choices lend themselves perfectly to a record that sounds slightly unresolved, in the tradition of a great cathedral never quite completed.
Our favorite track: Yet Again (87)
4. Heroes
Willie Nelson
At 79, you never know when a Willie Nelson album might be the last one he releases. If that were to be the case here, Heroes is a fine manifesto and a fitting farewell.There's the inexplicably-effective pairing with Snoop Dog and Kris Kristopherson on the ode to weed, Roll Me Up (26); a shout out to his real life heroes on Come on Back Jesus, (where he implores JC to "pick up John Wayne on the way"; he nods at his own mortality with a remake of his own A Horse Called Music, which he sings with Merle Haggard. Most noteably though, throughout the record, Willie's 23 year-old son, Lukas hovers in the shadows. With a voice resembling the younger Willie, he chimes in, almost as if to prop up the occasionally fading vocals of dad. The effect is quite touching and imparts a feeling that perhaps the son has too become one of dad's heroes.
Having long ago secured his finances and legacy, Willie is in the enviable position of recording simply because he enjoys doing so. Perhaps as an accommodation to age, he has plenty of company on this album. In addition to those mentioned, he pairs with Billy Joe Shaver, Sheryl Crow, Ray Price and Jamey Johnson, among others. What you're left with is a vision of Willie sitting on the porch, regaling his buddies with wisdom and wit -- and more than a little pickin'.
And like any wise person, Nelson knows there is very little original wisdom in the world. The majority of what we know, we learned form someone else. That being the case, he sees the value in sharing the words of others, as evidenced by his cover of Pearl Jam's Just Breathe, Tom Waits' Come on Up to the House and Coldplay's The Scientist. (although, it should be noted that the first time we listened to the record through, we liked every song except it, even before realizing it provenance).
Similarly, Nelson understands taking a second look at things can also be beneficial, such as on the aforementioned Horse and the Willie/Lucas/Price reworking of his own Cold War with You.
Collectively, this serves as a superb Willie's last Stand if it ends up being so, with the reins being passed on to the capable hands of Lukas, who wrote or co-wrote five of the tracks here. Then again, Willie's likely to outlive us all.
3. Wrecking Ball
Bruce Springsteen
"From Chicago to New Orleans/From the muscle to the bone/From the shotgun shack to the SuperDome/We needed help but the cavalry stayed home/there ain't no one hearing the bugle blown"In a world where corporations are people, It's every man for himself in 21st Century America and if you are looking to the government -- or anyone else -- to save you, you are fucked. The social contract that existed in the first half of the last century, whereby a mutual loyalty was mutually beneficial has been replaced by a system where enough is never enough and no one owes you shit.
That's the theme of this album, in all its harrowing detail. From opening track We Take Care of Our Own (2), through the final fadeout of American Land, Springsteen paints a damning portrait of the world in which we live. It is populated by the "rich man up on banker's hill" looking down on the Shackled and Drawn, a Jack of All Trades, who wants to, "find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight".
He laments Death to My Hometown (13), in a natural sequel to 1984's My Hometown. This time around though, there's no happy ending, no ride down the avenue with his boy on his lap, telling him it will all be ok. No, this time there's only the stark realization that, "Just as sure as the hand of God/They brought death to my hometown." This leads to the personal and national tones of This Depression (101).
Even when he trying to find hope or defiance, Bruce can't seem to find much and needs to call on older material than never made it onto an album. Wrecking Ball stands in the face of the chaos and screams, "If you got the guts mister/If you've got the balls/If you think it's your time/Step to the line/Bring on your wrecking ball". As the rest of the album makes perfectly clear though, the wrecking has already been done.
In classic Springsteen anthem style, Bruce sings of the Land of Hope and Dreams (47) but even this is tinged with sadness, as it contains the last musical notes ever played by Clarence Clemons. The Big Man stroked out the night after laying down the track, eventually dying. It eerily parallels the theme of this album and the death of the American dream.
Despite being a vocal (and obvious) Democrat, this is not Bruce railing against the right. The firmament of American society has cracked and may never recover. This fissure has manifested itself in runaway capitalism and finger-pointing politics but at heart, all of society's failures find their root in the individual. Similarly, so will the solutions. The spaghetti western We are Alive alludes to railroad workers, MLK and Mexican immigrants, with a core Springsteen populist message of survival despite the obstacles thrown our way.
That's the American spirit and, despite the crushing blows it has been dealt over the last decade, this remains the American Land, where even though, "They died building the railroads/They worked to bones and skin/They died in the fields and factories/Names scattered in the wind", the fact remains that, "There's diamonds in the sidewalk, the gutters lined in song/There's treasure for the taking, for any hard working man."
That note is as positive as the record gets and it mirrors how most people view where we are. We will be ok and things will get better but none of the social institutions we looked to in the past century will be there this time around. This time, we're on our own. We will take care of our own or we will perish.
2. Most of My Heroes Still Don't Appear on No Stamp
Public Enemy
"At the age I'm at now/If I can't teach/I shouldn't even open my mouth to speak". So sayeth elder statesman Chuck D on Rltlk. That's right, Public Enemy is serving as the voice of reason in the hip hop world. They look across the musical landscape they pioneered and they see a bunch of entitled, untalented wannabees who are more focused on misogyny and stackin' paper than they are on anything even closely resembling art. And it pisses them off.
Whether one has agreed with their words or not, Public Enemy has always stood for something. Their greatness has always been in their passion. This album makes it clear that they remain firmly committed to the success of the young black male. That doesn't mean refusing to change with the times, as Chuck raps, "I ain't mad at evolution/But I stand for revolution" on Get Up Stand Up (24), while blasting the results of that evolution, "How many more times we gotta hear that lame line/"I'm inspirin' 'em'"/To do what/Grow better weed and get higher than 'em/Feed the needy-ass greedy buyer in 'em/Be the same damned dog but to finer women?" Enough already -- it's time for the hip hop "artists" of today to grow the fuck up. The indictments flow on tracks like Catch the Thrown (a clear swipe at Jay Z and Kanye West) that expands the field of fire to include Corporate America: "Feed the people/Fight the power/Fix the poor/But that 1% done shut the door". It's standard PE populist ranting but that doesn't make it any less earnest. With killer hooks, well-selected collaborations and their usual superb production, this album also sounds completely fresh, which is pretty amazing for a group that is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Reveling in their place on, "the senior circuit", Chuck and Flav go past the artists in whom they are so disappointed, taking their case right to the fans, asking, "Is your mind, body, soul/Is it better from it?/Tell me why do ya'll love it/Songs meant to send you to prison/Bids to influence a million and a half kids". Their appraisal of the current state of hip hop is scathing and one we have been waiting for someone to have the balls to say for years now. Thing is, Public Enemy is probably the only group that could pull this off. Their relative lack of success outside their group (aside from Flavor Flav's ridiculous reality shows) allows them to retain the street cred they have built up, so when they blast the kids, they don't come off as embittered sell-outs.
While society, racism and oppression by The Man are also given attention here, our takeaway is an articulate statement on the drek that popular music has become and the effects is has on the kids who listen to it. The end result is, to us, the most important album of 2012, if not the absolute best.
With spoken-word interludes between songs, PE credits the civil rights pioneers who have led the way. It's a unique way of getting the recognition out there and is very effective. Amongst those listed are the expected, (Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez) and the obscure, (Cynthia McKinney, Dorothy Height, Colores Huerta). The inclusion, however, of cop killer Wesley Cook in and of itself eliminates the possibility of making this album the top record of the year. While we can appreciate that they are probably making a statement about capital punishment and race relations in general, the truth is that Cook killed a Philadelphia police officer in cold blood, in front of an eyewitness. He doesn't deserve to mentioned in the same breath as the true heroes that don't appear on no stamp.
1. Handwritten
The Gaslight Anthem
"I'm in love with the way you're in love with the night/And it travels from heart to hand to pen/Every word handwritten."*
Clearly we bought a lot of music in 2012. Some of it has been fantastic. Some of it has been dreadful. What though makes for the best? For us it takes something that transcends a mere enjoyable listening experience. There are albums that have great music. Some have insightful, intelligent lyrics that make us think. Others have flawless musical execution or phenomenal production. In rare cases, an album has all of that. Still, that doesn't necessarily make a record the best.
For that designation, an album has to have an added layer of importance to us -- something very much like love. We need to hear the right words, with the right music, at the right time and be open to it. It all has to click at the right time and for us, this album did. For us to consider an album to be an album of the year, we have to believe that in ten years, when we sit down and listen to it, it will take us back to a very specific place and time.
We remember spending about 30 bucks on the Wildwood boardwalk in the summer of 1986 to win a copy of Billy Joel's The Bridge, a week before it was to be released. Listening to it now, it's not very good but it was the first full album of new material of his that was released after we became a fan. We then remember racing back to the place we were staying, only to realize there was no record player. Somehow, some guy who, for the life of us, we can remember nothing about, other than he was and old dude -- maybe even 30! -- and clearly a Billy Joel fan, ended up scoring a cassette of it and we listened to it about 35 times that night. We remember nothing else of that summer after our father died except that afternoon and night down the Jersey shore.
Similarly, we remember our girlfriend at that time giving us copy of George Michael's Listen Without Prejudice, Vol I, as we left for the Gulf War. Until we were able to get into downtown Jeddah and score some bootlegs, it was the only cassette we had to listen to. The war ended fairly quickly and the relationship shortly thereafter but whenever we hear the opening notes of lead track Praying for Time, we're a 21 year-old kid in the dessert, missing the girl he loves.
There are not necessarily any watershed moments happening in our life right now, (not that we'd really know that until a few years from now anyway), but that doesn't mean we are without touch stones. This album is one.
Whether it was the pre-release single 45 (23) comparing a record to failed love or the superb lyrics of the title track (5) that are carried throughout the record, the first time we listened to this album we knew it would be a part of us forever. Much like Springsteen before them, The Gaslight Anthem takes a look around, sees the ordinary and explores it anyway. Real protagonists with real hearts and entirely human reactions to the situations life hands them. 50s and 60s beats with the occasional soaring chorus, they are New Jersey through and through.
While Brian Fallon's writing explores emotion, particularly the pain of love lost or simply missed, he stops short of full-on emo when he asks, "What can I keep for myself if I tell you my Hell?", on Too Much Blood.
His recent Tom Waits-inspired side project The Horrible Crowes creeps into his full time gig here and there, particularly on Here Comes My Man and the album's final track, National Anthem, which was likely a Crowes leftover. With lyrics like, "With everything discovered just waiting to be known/What's left for God to teach us from his throne/And who will forgive us when He's gone?", these influences only serve to enrich a truly straightforward rock 'n roll album of the finest order.
The deluxe version of the album includes a pretty cool cover of Nirvana's Sliver and a take on You Got Lucky that just might be better than Tom Petty's original. In addition to these, the deluxe version contains two additional originals: acoustic ballad Teenage Rebellion, and Blue Dahlia, the latter of which we still cannot believe got cut from the album. That kind of discipline though is what helps make this record so superb: they came in, said what they had to say and got out, without dumping a bunch of what they considered filler on us. (Still, how can you not include a song with lyrics like, "I met you between the wax and the needle/In the words of my favorite song."?) Arugh!
Sentiments like that had us from the start and make The Gaslight Anthem's Handwritten the Number One album of 2012. If you have a Spotify account, you can stream the entire album here. If not, we've linked each track below (and we apologize in advance for the lyric videos. We hate them too but trying to find a copy of the studio version of a song for which there is no official video often leaves one with limited options). Additionally, our Top 100 songs of 2012 Spotify playlist can be heard here.
1) 452) Handwritten
3) Here Comes My Man
4) Mulholland Drive
5) Keepsake
6) Too Much Blood
7) Howl
8) Biloxi Parish
9) Desire
10) Mae
11) National Anthem
Bonus 1: Blue Dahlia
Bonus 2: Sliver
Bonus 3: You Got Lucky
Bonus 4: Teenage Rebellion (unavailable online for linking)
*From the title track.
Previous: 75-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-31, 30-21, 20-11.
May you and those you love have a happy, healthy and blessed 2013.
Until next time,
Keep the Faith
-Gary and the editorial panel (of one).
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